Iron County register. [volume] (Ironton, Iron County, Mo.) 1867-1965, 1887-01-27
SWEDISH kNAcKBRoD.

Tho star or Life in One OF Swedens
toric Mining Towns.
AT FaIun we found the average
Swedish inn, with q cherries dlnlng
room. where each table was piled nign
with knackbrod, enough on each table
to feed twenty soldiers. Inc knaeA
brod is a national institution anu
sign surer than any sign post or 'front.'
ier stone to tell one that he is In oWe-
den. 1t is made of rye or barley nour,
mixed with potatoes and quantities Oh
carroway seeds, is baked in thin sheets
foot in diameter, with hole In the
middle, and through this hole the mar
ket women run a string and carry
it around for sale. In the bread
market at Stockholm they fasten these
strings of knackbrod to their shoulder
yokes in piles that reach from tine
yokes nearly to the ground. 10 an un-
appreciative palate it tastes quite as
much as it looks like dog biscuit and IS
tougher than any thing else the human
teeth struggle with. Beside the knack-
brod, the Swedes offer you many va
rieties of sweet bread full of carroway
seeds, and with the morning coffee give
you plates of these fancy kickshaws,
but never any plain white bread, and
the coffee at Falun was something to
make one SILVER with disgust. The un-
fortunate one who, following Mark
Twain's old plan of saying: IF this is
| coffee, give me tea; and if this is tea,
| give me Coffee and grandly ordered the
| coffee pot off the table. was sure she
was poisoned when she had rashly swal-
| lowed some of the tea. Then we
| mourned that we had ever let ourselves
be iolted more than hundred miles
| from Upsala to this dull, dead, stupid
provincial town of Falun, and an En-
glishman at an adjoining table further
consoled us by telling our American
| miner that the Falun copper mines
were not interesting and not worth
seeing at ALL .-There're all under
ground, YOU know" said the English
man, land you have to have a man
carry torches to see it. There's moth
ing picturesque there at all. !"
Despite the Englishman's kind infor-
nation that the mines were UNDER
ground, we made ready and drove
through the dreary line of villages that
combine to make the town of Falun to
the grufstuga, or mining office. The
whole region was sere and desolate.
covered with dump heaps, Stag and
refuse from the mine, and there was
enough sulphur and vitriol in the alf
to give us unpleasant sensations in our
throats, although the inhabitants claim
that these fumes have kept off cholera
and pestilence in times past. This Falu
rufra Falun mine), or stora koppar-
berget (great copper p1ountain),. has
the other high sounding titles OF the
purse" and the Treasury of Swe-
den," and its yield was once equal to
! the revenues of the Eronu. The
mine has been worked for over five
hundred years, as is known by
records, and all prehistoric mu
| seums, show how rich the bronze age
I was in Scandinavia, where the deposit:
I of Falun and Oster Gosland only coule
( supply the savages of those earlier cen
turtles. By the guides statistics thu
, mine regularly yielded 1922 tons o
l copper annually during the seventeenth
! century. It now yields less than SO(
tons annually. The company owning
the mine numbered 1920 proprietors il
/ 1916, and each of these shares is nov
worth a little over 800 in onr money
To any one who even knows about tn
copper mines of Lake Superior thi
Falun mine, with its poor ore, exhauste.
veins and high sounding titles. seems
small thing; and after seeing Americal
mining methods and machinery, tn
diamond drills, electric lights and worl
going on night and day by hundreds Q
. miners, the, Treasury OF Sweden
seems poor and trifiing affair
Rstan,ah, IN ST. louis Globe Democrat
TO. PREVENT COLDS.